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Talk:Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Archive 1

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Latest comment: 19 years ago by 140.247.81.75 in topic Peacock words, vanity, POV
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MIT alumni who died in September 11, 2001 terrorist attack

MIT alumni who died in the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack:

David M. Berray (SM 2000, Course 15) MIT tribute
Charles E. Jones (SM 1980, Course 16) MIT tribute
Frederick Kuo (SM 1970, Course 2) MIT tribute
Daniel M. Lewin (SM 1998, Course 6) MIT tribute
Donald A. Peterson (SB 1957, Course 6) MIT tribute
Thomas F. Theurkauf (SB 1979, Course 14) MIT tribute
John J. Wenckus (SB 1977, Course 2) MIT tribute

Source: alumweb.mit.edu/are-you-ok/list.shtml, 20 Oct 2001

MIT's suicide rate

Latest comment: 20 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

Removed this statement

This pressure contributes to MIT's suicide rate, one of the highest among American universities.

Need some statistics. After every suicide, the campus administration always mentions in the Tech that MIT's suicide rate is not actually particularly high among colleges. One factor to consider is that because MIT is small and relatively tight knit, the administration and the medical department intervenes *very* quickly and efficiently in response to students who are in danger of suicide. (They are very quickly sent off to Maclean's).

Yes, and regardless of whether MIT has a high suicide rate or not, I doubt very much that 'this pressure' of which the author speaks has been shown to contribute to MIT's suicide rate. It's an opinion thinly veiled as fact.


Um. Smallish, yes. Relatively tight knit, in some groups. Generally hands-off, sink-or-swim, driven, and at times merciless, also yes. Depressed students who want to disappear into the woodwork are able to do so. And there are no good stats for this phenomenon due to its inherently quiet nature... Furthermore, a few cases in which the administration and medical department were fully involved still ended tragically, e.g. Julie Carpenter, Elizabeth Kim... Carpenter's death in particular seems to have been a direct reaction to an administrative ruling... Sorry, still trying to understand the point that you are making. They're trying, and the numbers aren't that bad? They've failed before, and numbers cannot measure the full extent of the problem...
Something else that I've noticed is that MIT freshmen just seem a bit "odder" than students at other universities. What I've noticed about the MIT environment is that some people manage to come into it and just thrive, whereas other people come into it and quickly sink. It's often difficult to tell which will happen beforehand. My observation is that it usually is related to how well students connect to other students. "Odd" students who are socially isolated in high school, often find coming to MIT themselves connecting with other "odd" students, and these thrive. Conversely, people that don't connect tend to sink very quickly. It's sometimes frightening to see the degree to which students either thrive or self-destruct.
The point that I am making is that after every suicide there is a tendency to "blame the culture" and assert that maybe this sort of thing wouldn't happen if MIT was a "normal university."

--User:Roadrunner

According to a Boston Globe study published in February 2001, MIT had a suicide rate of 10.2 per 100,000 graduate and undergraduate students. The undergraduate rate was 20.6 per 100,000 students, compared to the national average for 17-to-22-year-olds, 13.5 per 100,000. MIT has claimed that the figures are statistically insignificant due to small sample size.

The Globe counted suicides among undergraduates between 1990 and 2001. Given that approximately 4,400 students are enrolled at MIT each year, this means that a total of approximately 48,000 student-years were examined. In that time, there were eleven suicides, which yields a rate of 22.7 per 100,000 (discrepancies between this number and the number reported in the previous paragraph are presumably due to more accurate counting by the Globe staff.) Because of small number statistics, the "true" suicide rate -- i.e., that that would be measured by an very large MIT in the limit of an infinite number of students -- is, to 95% confidence,  . At this level, MIT's suicide rate is consistent with the national average. However, at 65% confidence, it is higher than the national average. It would take approximately another thirty three years in order to obtain a measurement of the MIT suicide rate that could be distinguished from the national average at 95% confidence.

Additional problems with the Globe's methodology are detailed in an article by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. For example, the Globe neglected to take into account the elevated suicide risk in the general population for males and for students in technical disciplines, who comprise a larger portion of students in the Institute than in the general college population.

Yeah, yeah, whatever. This is typical MIT BS. When they can't win an argument they start pulling out impressive sounding numbers in an attempt to confuse their opponents.MIT Sucks 04:22, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

  • I (invisible internet person that I am) wrote that analysis of the MIT suicide statistics. I initially imagined that MIT was making it up and that they did have an elevated rate. My analysis, however, is correct, and in fact MIT does not have an elevated rate, no matter what you think. One need only consider NYU's terrible year ('04) to realize that suicides can not be so simply attributed to a harsh competitive environment, and that suicide epidemiology is not something you can guess at from personal impressions.
If you disagree with my analysis, please feel free to let me know here. I use standard small number statistics to investigate the question. If you "feel" it must be wrong, you should examine your prejudices.
Oh, and I went to Harvard, not MIT.

"Boston Tech"

I do not think the name "Boston Tech" ever had any official status, since I have seen copies of founding documents on MIT's web site saying the official name has never changed. (The original MIT campus was in Boston where Copley Square is now; it moved across the river to Cambridge in 1916. So the name "Boston Tech" was appropriate if unofficial.) -- Mike Hardy

And now I've confirmed it: See <http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/mithistory/charter.html#incorporate>. MIT was always MIT, never "Boston Tech", even if the latter phrase has some colloquial currency. -- Mike Hardy

"parking garage" simile

I have deleted the unjust "parking garage" simile. The old building that not-quite-surrounds Killian Court has great charm, and from my Neutral Point of View, I hereby sentence the author of the "parking garage" simile to Cruel and Unusual Punishment. Michael Hardy 21:44 Feb 10, 2003 (UTC)

Agreed. I'd don't know how you'd prove it, but I'd think from a NPOV MIT's campus and buildings are neither particularly lovely nor particularly ugly. Actually I think MIT students are sort of uncomfortable with and embarrassed by the monumental old buildings. Building 20 had a special funky charm, of course, but now it's just a memory.
What I don't understand is why nobody at MIT ever asserted that the library was sinking into the (marshy, Back Bay) ground due to the architect not have allowing for the weight of the books. I guess MIT's libraries are so embarrassingly small that it wouldn't have been credible. Dpbsmith 13:34, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Huh? "sort of uncomfortable with and embarrassed by the monumental old buildings"? I thought they were lovely (especially the Great Court, Lobby 7, etc), and so did many others. Now, the new buildings, boy, some of them are nightmares! Noel 20:29, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I agree. I don't see any reason why anyone would be uncomfortable with them or embarrassed by them. I like them, and I think I'm far from the only one. Michael Hardy 23:07, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
OK. Point taken. Will self-examine own feelings accordingly. The context was that I was saying MIT's campus and buildings (taken as I whole, I meant but failed to say) are neither particularly lovely nor particularly ugly, and trying to interpret somebody else's "parking garage" simile. Killian Court can be fairly described as a landmark (in a region that, of course, has many). Beats anything BU and Northeastern have to show, I think. I don't know what the current consensus on Kresge or the Stratton Student Center (an example of the "brutalist" building style?) would be. Of the gentlemen Killian, Stratton, and Weisner, Killian certainly got the best deal. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 15:39, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I notice "Muses" points to the a greek mythology thing, not a group.. —User:Mulad

Accuracy

Other beliefs that are strongly held by people within the school are that information should be widely disseminated and not held secret

I'm not sure this is accurate. While it was true in the early 1960s, the movement of MIT, and particular the AI Lab, away from this "open information" model to one dominated by proprietary corporate development was in fact one of the main reasons for the foundation of the Free Software Foundation as an opposing force. The article currently makes it sound like RMS was in harmony with the ethos at MIT, which he most decidedly was not.

MIT is a very diverse place, and there are parts of it where RMS fits right in. One problem with describing MIT is that its a very diverse and self-contradictory place.

Today, the MIT AI Lab has a somewhat poor reputation in some scientific circles for taking big-money contracts and keeping important portions of their results secret to allow for later commercial development. Not changing yet though, pending someone else commenting. Delirium 05:37 1 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Norbert Weiner went to Tufts as an undergraduate. He was around 11 years old (yes, I said eleven!) when he started. I remember because I myself started at Tufts when I was 14, and I found out I wasn't quite the youngest student Tufts ever had. It turns out that he had lived a few blocks away from me in Cambridge (though many years earlier).

Of course, Weiner went on to develop psycho-cybernetics, while I,

"I took the road less traveled by
"And that has made all the difference."

"Psycho-cybernetics"??

"Psycho-cybernetics"?? He did not! Psycho-cybernetics is a pop-psychology things. What Wiener introduced was cybernetics, not psycho-cybernetics. And his name is Wiener, not "Weiner". (I've redirected the "Norbert Weiner" page to Norbert Wiener. Michael Hardy 02:03, 4 Oct 2003 (UTC)

LOL & *blush* ! ! !

Neither Mitch Kapor nor Richard Stallman finished earning their graduate degrees at MIT. How to note this tastefully in the "Former Students" list?

Perhaps just by omitting to identify a degree that was not earned. Michael Hardy 20:49, 5 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Generalisations

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Examine second paragraph of MIT and other institutions section for generalisations - Hemanshu 11:45, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Right... it would be nice to see some sort of objective reference for this sort of thing. Incidentally, at least in the sixties, an MIT student would have felt right at home in the Harvard so-called "Division of Applied Science," which at that time was populated by tall ectomorphic nerdy-looking types carrying slide rules. And I imagine Harvard students would not feel out of place walking through the halls of the Sloan school.

I reworded the generalizations to make it clear that we are talking about stereotypes which need to be taken with a grain of salt. I didn't like the sentence that was there, because some people have substantial interactions with Harvard people, and find that the stereotypes are somewhat accurate. User:Roadrunner

There is a strong tendency for MIT people to sort of forget Harvard's immense contributions to computer science (or does Whirlwind trump the Mark I?)

One odd cultural characteristic--I haven't yet checked the Harvard article to confirm this--is that MIT students seem to be aware of some sort of rivalry with or relationship to Harvard, while Harvard students seem to be unaware of, or at least do not acknowledge any such relationship with respect to MIT.

As a Harvard undergraduate who frequents MIT to do research, I must agree with your assessment. MIT students make a habit of disparaging the liberal-arts stereotypes of Harvard culture, whereas Harvard students do not reciprocate MIT's attention and are much more concerned with Yale. 140.247.81.75 02:19, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

There _are_ cultural differences that stem directly from institutional differences. I wish I had kept a copy of the article in the Boston Globe magazine some five or so years ago that described in depth how the two schools handle admissions, and MIT's is indeed meritocratic, and Harvard's does indeed take into account a characteristic which they refer to as "lineage." Dpbsmith 13:19, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I think that difference in admission also spills over into student attitudes. Something that is the case is that students at Harvard are taught that they are special just for being Harvard students, while at MIT the message is just the opposite (i.e. you are special for what you manage to do at MIT, but just being there means nothing.) I think this also comes from deep historical roots. William Barton Rogers started Boston Tech in part to get away from the social class element of education. Roadrunner 31 Jan 2003
In the early 1960s some magazine, possibly Holiday (does it still exist?) did an article on Harvard--they were profiling various colleges at the time--and they quoted a Harvard student as saying "This campus is one place where you can't impress anyone by telling them you go to Harvard." In the next issue, the letters column had half a dozen letters that were variations on "Please inform Mr. so-and-so that we're not impressed by his going to Harvard, either," signed so-and-so, Wellesley... Dpbsmith 15:44, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

Building 20: stick with cleaned-up quotation?

I put in some stuff about Building 20, which is surely one of the most notable MIT buildings (and far more expressive of the tutelary genius of MIT than any building designed by any big-name architect.) I used a comment by Jerry Lettvin reported by Simson Garfinkel.

The version I used comes from here, and reads:

You might regard it as the womb of the Institute. It is kind of messy, but by God it is procreative!
Jerome Y. Lettvin, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering, quoted in an article by Simson Garfinkel, "Building 20: The Procreative Eyesore," from Technology Review, 94 (November/December 1991), page MIT11.

But Simson Garfinkel's quotation from Lettvin as it appears here reads:

you might regard building 20 as the womb of ideas. It is sort of what you might call the vagina of the institute. It doesn't smell very good, it is kind of messy, but by god it is procreative...
Can you please add a citation for this to the References section?

Should we stick with the apparently Bowdlerized version, or use the more authentic-sounding second version? Obviously I thought the clean version was more appropriate, but perhaps it is a little dishonest to use a quotation which I strongly suspect is inaccurate. Dpbsmith 03:10, 1 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I like the characterization from Jerry Wiesner in Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn. Quoting (page 28):
In 1991, I asked Jerome Wiesner [...], why he thought that "temporary" Building 20 ws still around after half a century. His first answer was practical: "At $300 a square foot, it would take $75 million to replace." His next answer was aesthetic: "It's a very matter-of-fact building. It puts on the personality of the people in it." His final answer was personal. When he was appointed president of the university, he quietly kept a hideaway office in Building 20 because that was where "nobody complained when you nailed something to a door."
18.24.0.120 03:40, 18 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Could I ask where Building 20 is? On the map to which MIT's main page links, I find Building W20, better known as the Stratton Student Center, and NE20. Is the latter the one intended? Michael Hardy 22:53, 31 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Building 20 doesn't exist any more. It was where building 32 (the Stata Center) is now. Not the same as E20, NE20, W20, or NW20, all of which also exist (or have existed in the past). (I guess if they ever built an annex to the mail services/furniture exchange building, it could be designated WW20.) 18.24.0.120 23:09, 31 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Thanks -- I am no longer confused. Michael Hardy 02:07, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Just checked, the wording in the article itself seems clear enough. The paragraph begins "The building of the Stata Center necessitated the removal of the much-beloved Building 20 in 1998."
(Offtopic) I gotta wonder just who it is who wants the fancy-schmancy buildings designed by prizewinning architects. When I was a grad student in zoology at Wisconsin, they built a new building for the department and there were endless meetings with the architect on what features were needed. My group said, over and over again, "the one thing that's really important to us is that the lab with our seawater aquariums have a slightly pitched floor leading down to a drain, because of spills." They nodded sagely, wrote it down. When the building was built, there was all sorts of fancy trim in the lecture halls and so forth, but the aquarium room had a flat floor and no drain, and within six months there had been a spill and the seawater had damaged some electronic equipment in the lab beneath... I regard the demise of Building 20 with considerable alarm. Dpbsmith 13:43, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I could flame about this topic for hours, but not in a public forum (even relatively anonymously). 18.24.0.120 20:17, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I find the last comment amusing as I so well recognize the IP address since MIT owns all of 18. Anyway, as for who "wants" the fancy schmancy buildings, I believe the idea is that the school needs more space. They're constantly working on plans to find ways to make more space, or if necessary add extra buildings. Especially since some courses, e.g. course 9, is growing at such a rapid pace. Thus the new Picower Institute and McGovern Center. I think the idea of the new buildings is following along the history of having "innovative" or "interesting" architecture. I.M. Pei's buildings, Baker House, and Kresge Auditorium all fit on that list. While the new buildings may not be considered beautiful, they do start discussion which is a great feature of the architecture. It makes people think and consider. Being a current undergraduate I entered and hated the new buildings, Simmons and Stata. But having been inside, they're interesting and somewhat like playgrounds to explore. By no means do I think they're aesthetically pleasing, but being inside them brings out a little of the MIT "personality" and culture in me and I think, in everyone else.

"Rivalry" with Harvard

The new paragraph is much better, and the notes about the attempted merger are relevant, but I still have a lot of problems with this. First of all, can't we get rid of the gushy self-congratulatory stuff like "The fact that these great centers of learning exist within a few miles along Massachusetts Avenue makes Cambridge one of the most interesting places to live in the United States?" I doubt that there's any NPOV to state this. And, without exaggerating the town/gown stuff, I still have to wonder whether the non-students living in the Central Square neighborhood find the presence of these "great centers of learning" all that "interesting." But I digress from my main point, which is...

...does this rivalry really exist? Of course it does at some level. I'm sure that the schools are aware of competing for faculty and eagerly await the delivery each year of the annual U. S. News and World Report rankings. But when I was at MIT, there was casual joking, and I felt a sense of social unease when in the Harvard Square area--this was at a time when most Harvard students wore suits and only perhaps 30% of MIT students did. But the rivalry was never much of a real presence. It wasn't like University of Colorado alums having parties and getting drunk watching the Buffalos play the Cornhuskers. I always felt that the institutions existed in separate worlds, almost unaware of the other's existence. And I never had the impression that any of my high-school classmates who went to Harvard spent much time thinking about MIT.

I've always suspect that the song that was printed in the East Campus Songbook was actually lifted from some military context, but not knowing anyone in the Army Corps of Engineers I've never been able to check... the one with the odd claim that "MIT was MIT when Harvard was a pup/And MIT will be MIT when Harvard's busted up," and continues with the charming verse:

"If we should see a Harvard man within our sacred walls We'll take him to the physics lab and amputate his balls; And if he hollers 'Uncle,' than this is what we'll do-- We'll fill his ass with broken glass and seal it up with glue!

Oh, we are, we are, we are, we are, we are the Engineers We can, we can, we can, we can demolish forty beers, etc."

Funny, though, I don't think I can remember anyone actually singing this verse. Dpbsmith 12:57, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Alleged school cheer

Latest comment: 20 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I strongly question the recently added reference to an MIT "school cheer":

Part of MIT's school cheer is: "Cosine, secant, tangent, sine! 3.14159!", a reference to pi.

This was universal among nerds in the 1950s. (It continued something like "Phi, Psi, Omega, Chi! Square root of y-squared equals y!") I certainly knew of it in high school, and later heard variants of it from the Bronx High School of Science and Lane Technical High School (Chicago) types. (It was my Lane friends that said that at Lane it had been changed to "Cube root of y-cubed equals y" to make it mathematically more correct).

I NEVER heard it at MIT, except in discussions of folks' high-school days. MIT did not as far as I know have a school cheer in the 1960s. But then, MIT did not have football in the 1960s either.

Does MIT now, in fact, have a school cheer? (I must say I would have hoped for something a bit more sophisticated...) Dpbsmith 16:26, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I'm going to remove the item, since nobody has responded. If anyone can verify that MIT has such a school cheer, they should reinsert it, but I ask that they indicate on this talk page what their source for the information is. Dpbsmith 13:00, 10 May 2004 (UTC)


MIT does in fact have the school cheer mentioned above - "Cosine, secant...", any doubts to this can be found somewhere in the MIT's Crew page (I believe many other teams may have this cheer on their webpage also.) Source? First hand knowledge. Also, see <http://web.mit.edu/mitcrew/www/cheer.html> for a full text of the cheer. I'll leave someone else with more wiki experience than me to put it in the page. Edave 02:11, 20 May 2004 (EST)

MIT's chant also ends differently than the "Square root..."Janet13 3 July 2005 08:17 (UTC)

Being at MIT right now, there isn't a "school cheer" that everybody knows. I'm sure the sports have their cheers such as crew, but in the HowToGetAroundMIT handbook that can be bought at the COOP, in the back is a set of songs, one of them having been adopted as "the school song" over the years. I believe it's called "The Engineers", but it does have "cosine, secant..." Ironically the current men's a capella group sings it at every concert and the entire audience stands up, so it's the closest we're going to get to a school cheer.

Is this a different song from:
We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the engineers
We can, we can, we can, we can demolish forty beers
Drink rum, drink rum, drink rum all day, and come along with us
We don't give a damn for any old man who don't give a damn for us!

and continuing with much male chauvinistic stuff about his left hand did the figures while his right hand traced the curves, and the inaccurate assertion that "MIT was MIT when Harvard was a pup?" Dpbsmith (talk) 29 June 2005 18:44 (UTC)

I've heard that one called the "Engineers' Drinking Song". --SPUI (talk) 29 June 2005 19:19 (UTC)
so i've checked and this is all right on the website, i've read it in the HowToGAMIT...http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1097830 has all the songs and their lyrics. maybe this will clear up any confusion..it did for me.
At least in the past few years, the men's group (Logs) have not been the ones that are known for performing the song. It's a coed group, the Chorallaries. Also, not all the choruses are chauvanistic nor R rated. MIT also has a more traditional alma mater song which no one seems to know :) Janet13 3 July 2005 08:17 (UTC)

Affirmative Action against asian students

Just curious: how do MIT's affirmative action programs harm asian admissions any more than those of caucasians? mnemonic 06:59, 2004 Jul 5 (UTC)

I have no idea either. I've taken it off. Unless someone can come up with at least an article (newspaper or otherwise) making an accusation so as to provide some kind of context for this, it seems silly and odd to promote this further.

it could be related to asians' status of being an over-represented minority at MIT, though that is just my speculation. mnemonic 05:27, 2004 Jul 6 (UTC)

it is my experience that "under-represented minority" at MIT means african-americans, hispanic-americans, and women. Other minorities in American society at large such as non-citizens (international students), southern Asian (Indian, Arabic, Persian, etc), and east Asian (Chinese, Korean, Filipino, etc) are certainly over-represented in the student body.


In discussions I've attended and seen Marilee Jones, the Dean of Admissions at MIT, the affirmative action programs don't harm Asian admissions, but also affirmative action at MIT is not done on a point basis or in any such way except for a more rigorous recruitment program that includes GOING TO the minorities and encouraging their applications. Many students never consider leaving their home region, or going to anything other than a state school, so the recruitment is to be more of an eye-opener. When it comes down to it, if a student were to be accepted and they weren't qualified, they probably wouldn't survive it through the freshman classes. But it's obvious asians aren't being hurt, they represent 4% of the American population and over 30% of the undergraduate population at MIT.

"coed"?

In this decade (and form some time before that) it would be very strange if an institution that, like MIT, is the world's leading institution in its specialties, were not coed. If it were all-male, that would be considered iniquitous, and if it were all female, that would be one of the most frequently mentioned facts about it. That being the case, doesn't "coed" in the first sentence border on being a waste of space? Maybe some demographic data on numbers of male and female undergraduates and similarly among graduate students and faculty, should be included and that word dropped. Michael Hardy 20:07, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I find that the article contains this:

For example, the Globe neglected to take into account the elevated suicide risk in the general population for males and for students in technical disciplines, who comprise a larger portion of students in the Institute than in the general college population.

Are males really a higher proportion among MIT students than in the general college population? I seem to recall that, among undergraduates at least (OK, maybe whoever wrote that sentence had in mind that the number of graduate students is larger than the number of undergraduates, dunno ....) the women now slightly outnumber the men (affirmative action, maybe?). Michael Hardy 20:11, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Nope. For whatever reason, women now comprise the majority of all university admissions, but it's not due to policy. Couldn't tell you why, but I'd suspect nobody could for sure. [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 20:15, 2004 Jul 27 (UTC)

I hadn't thought about it, but MIT is, I believe, slightly unusual in that it has been nominally coeducational, presumably since it admitted Ellen Swallow Richards c. 1870; certainly it described itself as coeducational in the early sixties. Nevertheless, this "coeducational" institution had only a minuscule number of women students until (roughly) the building of McCormick Hall in 1963. I'm not sure at what point it became functionally coeducational, in the sense of having enough women that "tech coeds" were no longer considered to be curiosities; probably not until the seventies. I expect that the term "tech coed" is no longer in use. Shortly after McCormick Hall was built, someone put up an improvised sign in front of it reading "Co-Techs," which was thought to be the height of sophisticated humor at the time.

It is hard to believe the atmosphere of a few decades ago. I attended Harvard summer school in the early sixties. During the year, the Lamont library was off-limits to women, but during the summer they were allowed. I once listened to a Harvard student go on a fifteen-minute tirade on the topic. He thought it was totally outrageous because a library was a place for serious work and it was, of course, utterly impossible to concentrate if there were women in the building. I am not kidding, and he was perfectly serious.

In the late 1960s I was in the company of my major professor and a distinguished professor from Yale; at the time, Yale was seriously a coeducation plan, and the distinguished professor was having a sustained and major hissy-fit about the very consideration of such a thing, ostensibly because he did not approve of lowering the academic caliber of the undergraduate class. My professor, who graduated from Yale, kept trying to suggest mildly that the plan was not to lower the academic caliber of the class, but to obtain a class of the same academic caliber as before—but containing women. The distinguished professor appeared to be unable to consider this, even as a hypothetical possibility. Yale did adopt the coeducation plan in 1969 and my understanding is that it is still considered to be a fairly good school.

Anyway, with respect to coeducation, the articles on Princeton University, Yale University, and Harvard University do not think that being coeducational is something that needs to be mentioned in the opening paragraph. Dpbsmith 21:24, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

MIT v. the Humanities

The heavy science and technology focus of the university can be seen by the fact that liberal arts and humanties are subsumed into one department with one major (Course XXI).

Hmmm. The last time I heard anyone rigorously classify the "liberal arts" was Martianus Capella, just before Rome went to pieces, but I don't think this statement rings true. Philosophy is a separate classification, Course 24. Poli. Sci. classes are pigeonholed in Course 17. Architecture types major in Course 4, and at least a few of their classes are weighted to the artistic, rather than the structural, aspects of that profession. (4.301 students often inflict odd public constructions, possibly works of art, on our campus.) All in all, the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences offers 12 majors: Anthropology, Comparative Media Studies, Economics, Foreign Languages and Literatures, History, Linguistics, Philosophy, Literature, Music, Political Science, "Science, Technology and Society" (barroom chat made academically respectable), and finally Writing and Humanistic Studies. Economics and anthropology may seem too "scientific" to count, although the general weighting is pretty clear (and I'd personally say that economics is too "soft", and its math too easy, to be anything but a "liberal art"--ha ha, only serious). These categories have considerable over- and interlap; my favourite literature classes were offered jointly with the CMS faculty.

On a very ethereal level, one could argue that MIT approaches the "humanities" in a way few other universities attempt. For example, our Prof. Donaldson spearheads the Shakespeare Electronic Archive, which lets users compare Quarto and Folio editions side-by-side, while simultaneously viewing still-photography or video works based on the scene in question. This sort of post-linear scholarship does occasionally feed back into more traditional areas, such as identifying the various hands at work in each copy of the Bard's work that we possess. SHEA lets us distangle the different editors, compositors and actors who all influenced the Shakespearean canon, and it provides a handle on the complexity which can make finding a single, authoritative text impossible. I could discuss this at much greater length—it's the example most familiar to me—but let me just say that such projects make the "technocentricity" issue a subtle one. (Are we focusing on extremes instead of means? Do a few clever minds redeem the Institute? etc.)

Over on the east side, John Maeda's design work at the Media Lab is floofy enough to count as art, by anybody's textbook. To belabor a very obvious point, art don't happen without tools; if the minds that deal with technology are not aiming for a scientific goal—if they are not using the "scientific method" to pose questions of the Universe—then the result may well be called artistic. Didn't Bill Watterson make a point about the quality of depth and perception being more important than the medium? (Someone look in the last pages of the Tenth Anniversary Book—I know it's there.)

Please don't confuse this with an apology for MIT's supposed technocentric nature. In my highly arrogant POV, the school would be far better off if the powers-that-be trashed the entire humanities requirement. While some of our professors are stunningly brilliant, and many of their classes are fascinating, the rules which govern the categories students must sample are, in a word, absurd. I've yet to hear a student speak out in favor of the HASS status quo, which everyone sees as a farrago of counterproductive regulations. More than one professor has scoffed at the babble of HASS-D, HASS-CI, CI-H and CI-M that complicates our lives, and the gibberish surrounding these courses is a favourite target of our campus humourists.

There are far more cogent objections to MIT's Weltanschauung than the "Criticisms" section lists. I'd recommend starting with Ben Snyder's The Hidden Curriculum (I'll find the ISBN when I have a moment to look). It is a little disquieting that the book's main criticisms, formulated in the late sixties, have gone largely unanswered; worse yet, several developments which Snyder highlights as progress have recently been reversed. (Pass-fail grading has been cut to half of freshman year, for example, and many other recent initiatives seem to bring back the paternalism that Snyder was glad to see decay.)

Upshot of all this: I'm removing the sentence I quotated above. There should be better indicators of MIT's sciento-techno-electrological orientation than a statement about the course catalog—one which happens to be wrong anyway.

Anville 17:45, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Maxwell Griffith, The Gadget Maker

Recent edits have removed this quotation, formerly a long caption under a picture of the Great Dome at night:

At night, floodlights glare from artfully concealing shrubbery and lave the main building with a white light that emphasizes black-trimmed, three-story windows rising in uninterrupted, eye-leading verticals toward a dominant, austere dome mimicked from some classic pile of ancient Rome. On every slab-sided cornice, like proclamations of faith needing no explanation, are chiseled Darwin, Newton, Aristotle and, in lesser letters, the names of the more numerous Lavoisiers and Eulers and Faradays who have discovered the chemical elements or evolved the equations or stumbled upon the fundamentals of nature. Indeed, not unlovely is the breeding ground of technicians and engineers which, as announced in stone above great, fluted columns, is the MASSACHVSETTS INSTITVTE OF TECHNOLOGY.
—Maxwell Griffith, The Gadget Maker (1955)

I really liked that quotation and I hate to see it go. Is there no proper place for it? As far as I know, The Gadget Maker is the only novel ever written that has a substantial portion of it (an entire chapter of some thirty pages) that takes place at MIT. MIT figures in this novel not just in passing, but as an important part of the story. The chapter is, in fact, a detailed portrait of campus life at MIT in general, and in the aeronautics department in particular, in the 1940s.

There must be dozens set at Harvard (Erich Segal's Love Story, Owen Wister's Philosophy 4, Myron Kaufman's Remember Me to God... off the top of my head...)

I had thought of a section "MIT in literature" or "MIT in popular culture" but... well, there isn't any, to speak of. One mention in a song called "Big Ball in Boston" ("about five miles from Harvard there's a campus you must see/MIT/KEY/M-O-U-S-E"), another called "No Beans in Boston," some folk trio's "Thinking Man's John Henry" ("Now the man who ran the computer/Was from a place called MIT...")... Good Will Hunting of course, and A Beautiful Mind...' although neither movie shows any veridical MIT settings. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 17:06, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

How about the early chapters of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! ?
—Anville 00:46, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)
... and there's the film Good Will Hunting. Michael Hardy 01:37, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)
MIT seems to be a standard reference when a filmmaker wishes to establish a character as technically skilled, gifted at invention, etc. For example, Trey Parker's sidekick in Orgazmo has "Ph.D.s in physics and engineering from MIT." —Anville 22:38, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)
There's also "Entertaining Strangers" by A. R Gurney and (while more of an autobiography than a novel) "The Idea Factory" by Pepper White. (There was a blog post by Philip Greenspun some time ago that mentioned these as _the_ books of MIT, in the same way, I suppose, that This Side of Paradise is _the_ novel about Princeton. (I never finished Entertaining Strangers, but TIF is worth a read. jdb 00:13, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Nice! IIRC Gurney was (is?) in fact a professor, in the English department or something course-XXI-ish, and wrote several plays which have been fairly successful... ...hmmm.... he's not under MIT people... should do something about that but not right now. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 10:58, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Dpbsmith, could you add some content to The Gadget Maker? great book, would be nice if MIT picked up the rights to it and restarted distribution...
Will do. Probably this weekend. You mean you actually know it? I think it's a decent novel, although it is sort of a downer. I want to empathize/identify with Brack but he turns out to be, ummm, tragically flawed. I think it's a social document of some importance, both for the scenes of MIT during the late 1940s and the scenes of a West Coast aerospace firm during the 1950s.
The copyright was renewed in the 1980s. I've been trying unsuccessfully to contact the publisher and/or Maxwell Griffith for a while now. I've scanned the entire MIT chapter, and would like to get permission to put it online. Online phone searches return exactly one hit for Maxwell Griffith in the U. S., in Raquette Lake, New York, and he has a listed phone number and address, but the phone number has not been answered and I've received no reply to mail I've sent. The publisher, J. B. Lippincott... well, it's one of those typical messes where there's been a string of mergers and acquisitions. Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins does not do fiction and so far I've had no luck contacting the publisher which they say picked up the fiction. Oh, and he is not a current member of the Author's Guild and they have no contact information.
My local public library had a copy, and they culled it (and of course I didn't find out about it until it was gone). I have a paperback copy, rather brittle, that I got from a secondhand book dealer.
The most curiosity-provoking thing about the MIT chapter is that when the protagonist decides to major in aeronautical engineering, he is interviewed by the head of the department who, it transpires, is really not very interested in anything about Stanley Brack other than verifying that he is not Jewish (!). [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 13:23, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)
i was able to purchase both a soft and hard cover copy from the used book section of www.bn.com. also, the university of michigan apparently once used the book in an "engineering english" course.

Other occurences of MIT in popular culture: David Letterman once jokingly suggested that some silly stunt of the sort he often has was some incomprehensibly high-tech sort of thing and that therefore they had teams from MIT and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory standing by. I think he also once suggested that programming a VCR is so involved that you need an MIT degree to do it. A number of Heinlein stories mention MIT. So does at least one Kurt Vonegut novel, Galapagos. Ben Bova's novel The Weathermakers, about scientists developing methods to prevent hurricanes from reaching land, is set in part at MIT. Michael Hardy 02:46, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Ah, well if we're mentioning television shows... On I've Got a Secret, Garry Moore once had Doc Edgerton in person as a contestant. (This was a popular panel show to which they would invite vaguely interesting guests and the panel had to guess the guests' "secrets.") Edgerton's "secret" was that he was going to photograph a bullet in flight, cutting a playing card in two, right there on live TV. After the questioning was over—I don't remember if the panel guessed corrrectly, they were actually very good and they might have—the curtain rose on the setup, 0.22 rifle, card, backstop, Polaroid camera, triggering microphone, Microflash and all. Edgerton explained. Moore said "This card right here?" giving it a demonstrative flip with this card, which, of course, naturally through it out of alignment and there was a pause while Edgerton and his assistants had sighted through the gun barrel and realigned the card. (It occurs to me that I probably wouldn't have put my finger in the place where a bullet was planned to go, but now that I think about it Moore had a little streak of bravado... once got his hand broken on live TV during one of their stunts.) [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 13:41, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Peacock words, vanity, POV

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I would really like to see the peacock strutting toned down. If we are going to say things like "MIT is widely considered to be one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world" I would like to see some shred of objective backing for that statement.` If "one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world" means "one of the top 100" or "one of the universities which most college-educated Europeans would recognize by name," well, sure. But is it really in the same class with Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne? It we are going to say "it is consistently ranked as the top university for science and technology in the United States" I would like to have it briefly stated "by whom." Dpbsmith

—I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but of course it's in the same league as the universities you mention above in prestige, according to NPOV. If you want objective evidence, just look at US News's peer review rankings and you'll see that there are only 5 universities in the US given the highest ranking of 4.9 out of 5.0 -- Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Yale and Princeton. Furthermore, the stats on selectivity and graduate program strength later in the article substantiate MIT's status very effectively. Not sure why you think the Sorbonne is so prestigious anymore -- it generally figures in no international rankings these days. The Cambridge-MIT institute was formed to bring MIT's strengths to Cambridge and England. That sounds like pretty objective evidence of its perception abroad. MITalum 17:07, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
    • By golly, you're right—Oxford, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne didn't even make it into U. S. News' top 100! Dpbsmith
      • Thanks for the constructive dialog. You mentioned Harvard and Yale, so I brought up a ranking which includes and compares them. If you'd like to mention a ranking which includes the Sorbonne, please do so. And yes, I'm willing to concede that Sorbonne has a far more prestigious program in French history than MIT.
      • I believe the U.S. News & World Report rankings only rate U.S. universities. 63.159.196.189 23:53, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

And it's just silly to say "MIT has been featured in numerous works of fiction, most famously in the Academy Award-winning films Good Will Hunting and A Beautiful Mind." As I mentioned in my remark above, literary and cinematic references to MIT are in fact very rare indeed. One might say that there is a notable discrepancy between MIT's prestige and its visibility in fiction. Dpbsmith

—I guess you don't see enough movies. MIT references abound. Whenever a movie wants to say someone is a technical or scientific genius, they often mention they're an MIT grad. Even recent mainstream blockbusters like Independence Day, The Recruit, XXX, etc. display this. MITalum 17:07, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

By the way, is it still true that MIT's library is notable for its relative poorness compared to other universities of similar reputation... yeah, I see it is:

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V109/N11/lib.11n.html

A recent ranking of 100 university libraries puts MIT in a tie with Wayne State University for 47th place. The list was compiled by the Association of Research Libraries.... Harvard was judged by ARL as having the best university library system, with almost 12 million volumes in circulation, and a total yearly expenditure of $37,196,490 to maintain its libraries. MIT libraries have a total of 2,203,392 volumes, and spent roughly $10 million on its system last year. Also ranked in the top ten included University of California at Los Angeles, University of California at Berkeley, Yale, Stanford, Columbia and the University of Texas.
—The fact that you're linking to an article from 1989 shows your lack of NPOV. What do you have against MIT? MITalum 17:07, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
It might do well to keep in mind that most literature research in the sciences today are done via the Internet and computer databases. As a Harvard student, I have heard many times student accounts of never going into the Widener Library (Harvard's largest) once in their undergraduate years. The library system in Harvard is often used more as quiet places for studying, rather than for research. (Although I don't know about the views of scholars and students of the humanities.) 140.247.81.75 02:20, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

[[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 12:38, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Just saw this on RfC. Most of the "peacock words" would be fine, or at least, better, if citations were used more in the article. There are a bunch of sentences saying something rather uppity (not that I don't think it's deserved), with no citation, or at the least no clear citation. The best bet would be that if users want to keep those sentences, cite them a bit- or tone down the language slightly. Probably something that could be done for all the top univerisites as well. I'll come back when I'm not in my own Uni's computer lab and see if I can't try to tone it down a bit. Lyellin 15:39, Oct 4, 2004 (UTC)

Saw this on RfC. It does seem over the top a bit, and I agree if such superlatives are merited, you oughta probably get some respectable quotes. Tom - Talk 19:54, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

MIT is without a doubt in the same league (actually better) than Harvard & Yale in several fields, including my specialty, economics. It's maybe not a bad idea to tone down the peacock stuff, but the same sentiment then applies to articles on the other institutions you mention. Wolfman 04:51, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Indeed it should. I just took a quick peek at the article for the little red outhouse up the river and nothing of the sort obviously leaps out at me. The school in New Haven on the other other hand, seems to be strutting rather brightly-feathered plumage. The Dreaming Spires seem suitably understated, but its rival seems anxious that you know how many Nobel prize winners it has produced, how it regularly trounces Oxford in the UK News and World Report rankings, and that it is "often regarded as one of the most prestigious universities in the English-speaking world and beyond." Eeeeewwwwww....
The stuff I really had problems with in the MIT article has now been toned down enough for me to tolerate. " A a world leader in science and technology, as well as in many other fields, including management, economics, linguistics, political science, and philosophy" seems OK. (I'm not a manager, economist, linguist, political scientist, or philosopher so I'm taking others' words for that). I guess I should request that the RFC be removed.
All top universities are better than other top universities in "several fields." [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 13:46, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Brass rats

Ummmm. . .

The design varies slightly from year to year, but is always made of solid gold (without any gemstone), and features a three-piece design, with the MIT seal and the class year each appearing on a separate shank, flanking a massive bezel bearing an image of a beaver. Its official name is the "Standard Technology Ring", but its colloquial name is far more well known -- the "Brass Rat".

This doesn't sound quite right:

  • A ring made of "solid gold" would be a pretty dentable ornament. I never got a Rat myself—my school spirit was never sufficiently distilled—so I don't know what specific karat-ratings were available.
  • Most of the upperclassmen and alumni I know (a biased sample, to be sure) own the stainless steel version. In a "ha ha only serious" way, they claim they bought it so they could open beer bottles.

Perhaps I should also mention my old roommate, who casts copies of his own Brass Rat in silver, for anybody who wants one.

Anville 17:44, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

They are making rats out of stainless steel now? What a hack! I wonder how many people who buy them know of the Harry Harrison novel.... Noel 20:24, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Siladium rat

Well, nobody said it was pure solid gold. This brochure says that the 2003 ring is available, in order of increasing price, in "siladium," "polara," 10K, 14K and 18K.
Which raises the obvious question: what the heck are siladium and polara (note red links). Oddly, the brochure doesn't say Even odder, Googling on "siladium polara" (not in quotations) yields only three hits, all to MIT class ring pages. However, ArtCarved High School Class Rings explains that "Siladium is comparable to a fine jeweler's stainless steel." If it is only "comparable" I suppose that means that it is not actually fine jeweler's stainless steel, leaving open the question of what, precisely, it might be. This site also describes it as "a stainless steel like material." Perhaps nobody can bring themselves to say right out "it is stainless steel?" [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 18:10, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Chesu! Everybody I know just calls it "stainless steel".
Anville 17:42, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)
OK, and what do they call "Polara?" [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 19:45, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I own a Siladium rat and a 14K gold rat (class of 2006). I believe Polara was the name given to a gold-colored non-precious alloy available for Class of 2003 and perhaps one or two other years.
But what is it? Anodized aluminum? Hey, wait... you don't suppose it could actually be a kind of... brass? Dpbsmith (talk) 20:46, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)
As of the late 1980's there was an option for white gold instead of the usual yellow gold; the white gold rings were referred to as stainless steel rats. Relatively few people opted for them. Referring to gold as brass and white gold as stainless steel was very much in character with other self-deprecatory parts of the MIT culture --Sommerfeld 13:59, 2005 Feb 3 (UTC), MIT '88

Getting an education from MIT is like taking a drink from a firehose.

brainyquote attributes this to Jerome Weisner. Does that seem at all likely? It was a popular metaphor in the 1960s but was not then attributed to anyone in particular. Is this a case of credit where credit is due, or something that Weisner said because he had heard it said, or just an illustration of the observation that an unattributed quote will attach itself to anyone plausible? [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 15:42, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

If or when some Wikipedian gets around to hacking together that "MIT in popular culture" section, they should remember to include the lines from Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire:
  As you remarked the last time we went by
  The Institute:  "I really could not tell
  The difference between this place and Hell."
Har har. Anville 14:57, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Really? "Tech is Hell" was a common meme and wall sign in the mid-1960s; anyone know about before and since? I wonder whether this was a reference to Nabokov or vice versa. A classmate of mine papered his dorm room wall with a collage of Playboy pictorials spelling out "Tech is Hell." A Voo Doo cartoon of the period showed sinners amidst flames being poked by devils with tridents, backed by a big sign reading "Hell is Tech." The funny thing is that I don't ever recall anybody referring to it as "Tech;" the sobriquet was "The Institute" or "The 'Tute." [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 15:40, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Well, I really don't know whether Nabokov was joking about MIT or if his usage fueled that of the students. The passage in Pale Fire is about IPH, the Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter, so it's certainly consistent with the novel's own structure and doesn't need an extra explanation. In this respect, it's much like the "drink from a firehose" gag in "Weird Al" Yankovic's movie UHF. On the other hand, Nabokov certainly taught at Harvard and Wellesley, and Alfred Appel has identified specific allusions to Wellesley College in Lolita, so who knows?
"Institute", "Institvte" and "'Tute" all seem to be the most common nicknames in current usage (informal sampling of current students, recent alumni, hallway posters, etc.). However, "the Tech" was possibly prevalent in an earlier age (witness the name of the abominably wretched campus newspaper). For example, in James Gleick's biography of Richard Feynman, modestly entitled Genius, Gleick describes Feynman's first impressions of Caltech:
He had endured one too many days kneeling in cold slush as he tried to wrap chains around his tires. Caltech appealed to him. It reminded him of the other Tech, such a pure haven for the technically minded. Four years at a liberal-arts university [Cornell] had not softened his outlook.
The earlier chapter of Genius describing Feynman's life at MIT is also an interesting read, quite possibly germane to this article. Gleick cites the yearbook (Technique 1938) as saying, "Let none say that the engineer is an unsociable creature who delights only in formulae and slide rules." Gleick's description of the humanities curriculum, "prepackaged morsels", which to Feynman "seemed like supremely useless knowledge, a parody of what knowledge ought to be", feels very resonant even today.
Aha! On page 83, Feynman is applying to graduate schools:
His first thought was to remain at MIT. He believed that no other American institution rivaled it and he said so to his department chairman. Slater had heard this before from loyal students whose provincial world contained nothing but Boston and the Tech, or the Bronx and the Tech, or Flatbush and the Tech. He told Feynman flatly that he would not be allowed back as a graduate student—for his own good.
Incidentally, the physics department still has this attitude to a large extent, although I hear that in the last few years it's shifted somewhat. (Hearsay has no place in the Wikipedia, so don't quote me on that!)
Anville 16:38, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I thought all good grad schools schools had that attitude. Re the newspaper, believe it or not I had never even once thought of "The Tech" (with a "The") as a being a reference to the name of the school. As a matter of fact we all thought the name was sort of weird and hard to parse, and in my circle it was usual to say "Have you read the The Tech" today" using a schwa for the first "the" and an emphased long-e in the second. There are references to MIT as having been called "Boston Tech," probably before the move to Cambridge... [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 21:44, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)
To repeat once again: If the name Boston Tech was once current, it was not ever official, even before 1916 when MIT was across the river in Boston. See the founding documents on MIT's web site. Michael Hardy 00:02, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Tech is Hell was rarely used by the late 1980's; I suspect that IHTFP had taken its place by then. However.. is it just me, or is the mural on the north wall of the Walker Memorial dining room a Tech is Hell allegory? Virtuous figures at the top, the earth in the middle, and, at the bottom, surrounded by smoke & steam, we find the MIT main group buildings..--Sommerfeld 14:34, 2005 Feb 3 (UTC), MIT '88
I never thought of that! I tried to get some pictures of those murals the last time I was there, but they didn't come out particularly well... I'd love to know more about their background. Wait, (click click) [1], here's some stuff... "The symbolic figure of the scientist stands between two great jars containing beneficent and maleficent gases" (!!!!!) It is hard to imagine the days when people could actually write things like that—and paint murals like that—with a straight face. It appears that the same man painted murals for the Library of Congress] Dpbsmith (talk) 16:53, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Another popular-culture occurrence of MIT: It's a popular tourist attraction for Japanese people. One frequently sees Japanese tourists taking pictures of the Great Dome or of each other with the Great Dome in the background. Michael Hardy 00:02, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Well, they're not all Japanese. (-; Anville 15:10, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

It is done. I hacked the "popular culture" section together; now it's somebody else's responsibility to make it good. Har har. (By the way, the edit from 65.96.173.131 is also me—bloody cookie problems. . . .)

Anville 02:15, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Anybody want to mention "Infinite Jest", wherein MIT features rather prominently? It's been a while since I read it, and I don't have a copy. Birge

Grading system and hours

In the 1960s MIT's systems for designating units (course hours), grades, and subject numbers were all slightly unusual. Are the same systems used today?

a) I think most universities measure coursework in terms of the number of lecture hours per week; thus, most subjects are either two units or three units and a "full load" might be fifteen units. MIT assigned separate numbers of hours for lecture, lab, and outside preparation. Thus, one course with three lecture hours per week might be designated 3-0-6, another might be designated 3-0-9, and IIRC a nominal "full load" was 45 hours.

b) MIT assigned numerical equivalents to grades according to a five-point scale with A = 5; perfect performance was "five-oh." I think practice varies, but that it is more common to use a four-point scale (A = 4, perfection = "four-oh.")

c) Many universities designate course as department-name + 100*level + sequence number. Thus, the introductory courses are Physics 101, Zoology 101, etc. and 101 is even a fairly common U. S. colloquialism for "elementary." MIT of course uses a department number, a decimal point, and a subject number.

d) Finally... I'll bet this has changed... the grand metric of personal worth was the cumulative grade, which was referred to for short by the first syllable of the name. Pronounced with a long "u", but spelled "cum," of course. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 00:56, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)


The first three points are certainly still valid. Most lecture-based classes, for example, are marked something like 4-0-8. Four twelve-unit classes is usually a respectable load for each semester, and taking five is not unusual. The course-naming system is still fixed in carborundum; as a result, we don't really have an accepted colloquialism for "easy" or "introductory". (This is probably beneficial: after all, what is easy for a physics mind isn't even necessarily obvious to a mathematician.) The different departments vary on their conventions for the digits after the decimal place. For example, the EECS people start out with 6.001 and 6.002, while the intro biology requirement can be met by 7.012, 7.013 or 7.014 (which all seem equivalent to me, except for maybe a spring/fall semester difference). Generally, higher numbers after the decimal point indicate more advanced material (an echo of the more widespread system), but this is of course not a finely-grained distinction. The most significant digit usually indicates a subcategory: I believe all classes beginning with 18.3 are in the applied mathematics section.
I have no usage data for part (d). It is safe to say, a priori, that the student maturity level has not materially increased, and sexual or scatological locutions are far from unknown. This particular one may have passed by the wayside—perhaps because students don't spend enough time calculating and re-calculating their GPA to make a vocabulary necessary. The most prevalent forms of speech seem to be metaphors involving forcible violation, through the orifice of the speaker's choice. (The absence of lubrication is also invoked.) These statements can go either way: one is "fvcked by the Tvte", but one can also "rip a test a new one".
Where are the philologists when we need them? I certainly believe that MIT is worthy of anthropological study, but perhaps this is a phallusy. Anville 02:13, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Material buttressing claims of academic excellence

The following material was recently removed from the article, because it struck some readers as an overemphasis on MIT's excellence to the point of braggadocio. It is preserved here as objective evidence in support of the suitably brief statements now in the article regarding a) MIT's academic excellence, and b) its nurturing of invention and entrepreneurship. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 16:44, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Today, MIT is ranked by The Atlantic Monthly and other magazines as the most selective college in the United States. The last National Research Council peer review ranked MIT as the university with the most graduate programs ranked in the top three nationwide for quality of faculty and effectiveness of teaching, with a total of 34, ahead of Berkeley (16), Stanford (18) and Harvard (18), despite only having doctoral programs in only 23 of the 41 subjects examined. According to US News, the Sloan School of Management is ranked #1 in more disciplines than any other business school in the country, the School of Engineering has been ranked #1 for nine consecutive years, and MIT has tied for the highest reputational score every year with Harvard, Stanford, Yale and Princeton.
Invention and entrepreneurship are core Institute values. MIT leads all independent US universities in patents granted every year, and administers the Lemelson-MIT Prize, the largest award for invention in the nation. The MIT $50K Business Plan Competition is one of the most well-known student competitions, with many participants going on to receive venture capital funding and launching successful corporations. According to a 1997 report entitled MIT: The Impact of Innovation, "if the companies founded by MIT graduates and faculty formed an independent nation, the revenues produced by the companies would make that nation the 24th largest economy in the world."

Tempted, but resisting...

Having just looked at an article on Amity High School that asserts that the school a) was built 50 years ago and b) is sinking 1.25 inches/year—which by my arithmetic would put its original ground floor underground by now—I am sorely tempted to add this to the MIT article:

Thanks to MIT's well-known excellence in architecture and engineering, MIT is the only university that is built on marshy land whose library is not said by students to be sinking into the ground due to the architect's failure to allow for the weight of the books.

So far, I'm resisting... [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 13:37, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Aw, you're no fun! Adding that would be a great hack! :-) Noel (talk) 06:17, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Songs that mention MIT

  • "Big Ball in Boston" (Kingston Trio version)
  • "No Beans in Boston" (Peggy Lee)
  • "John Henry, the Thinking Man" (Brothers Four version).

Any others? [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 01:05, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Check out the CDs of some of the a cappella groups among the students. Here's one: The Engineer's Drinking Song. Google it and you'll find lyrics comparing MIT to Hell. Michael Hardy 02:15, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Oh, well... I wasn't really thinking of that sort of thing or I would have added the MIT alma mater to the list. Is "The Engineer's Drinking Song" the one about "his right hand worked the problems while his left hand traced the curves?" And the line about seeing Venus De Milo and saying "the whole damn thing is just concrete and should've been reinforced?" Or is it the one with the refrain "We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the Engineers/We can, we can, we can, we can demolish forty beers?" [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 02:54, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)
The latter, if those are two different songs, but I'm not sure they are. Michael Hardy 22:01, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)
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